My hair was down, pushed behind my shoulders exactly as Dahes liked it. With each step through the halls, I felt myself growing colder. My feet were frozen, the numbness slowly working its way up my legs toward my throat, until it cut off my breath, my voice… but not my thoughts.
Suns. I hated how I was struggling to make my mind numb. I couldn’t turn it off anymore, like I lit the flame of my emotions in Viven, and now it wouldn’t extinguish. The fire too wild, too far gone to suffocate.
A roar sounded overhead. Tilting my head toward the open sky in the rotunda, the fog swirled, dispersing as the flap of wings rang through my ears.
Another roar sounded, darkness still flooding my vision, but itdidn’t look like the fog. I pressed my back against the stone wall before I saw it.
Ablackdragon—the Ater.
The dragon completely engulfed the entire rotunda. Its wings were extended, cramping the space, unable to stretch to its full height.
Its head whipped toward me as it roared again. I briefly saw Dahes smirking out of the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t stop staring at the dragon.
Its eyes were just as dark as its scales, everything blending together like midnight rain. Its talons were even darker, the purest shade of onyx I’d ever seen. It rapped one against the floor, the stone instantly cracking, creating a hole in the ground.
It blinked as smoke puffed out of its nose, and I was instantly engulfed in heat, my back sticky, pieces of my hair plastering across my neck.
“I thought…”
Dahes’ eyes pierced through me, cutting off my voice, but my thoughts wouldn’t stop.
I thought Aters were extinct.
“You learned a lot while you were away, little ghost,”Dahes crooned inside my mind, and I knew he was reading my thoughts.
Then another realization dawned…
The Ater’s power was psychic manipulation. Was his Vinculum how he was able to control me? How his deal was soul binding? How he could read my thoughts, get inside my head, hear everything?
“Yes.”
Shit. I had to turn it off.
Breathe. One. Two. Three. Four. Exhale.
Stop thinking, Magnolia. Just breathe.
Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think.
Dahes scaled the dragon, leaving me staring up at him with my back still pressed against the wall. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two thatchers fly onto the stone archway. One was holding a female I’d never seen before. The other had its beady eyes set on me.
If I hadn’t been leaning against the stone, I would have fallen over.The Ater dragon raised its wings, its hind legs extending, and flew skyward. The fog swirled around me, temporarily blocking my view of the thatchers as I lost sight of the dragon.
Bones crunched and rot consumed me as one of them scooped down the moment Dahes was airborne.
I couldn’t even inhale before we were flying into the fog-lit night.
The twin sunswere rising in the sky by the time we made it to the Sinking Islands of Perinth.
I glimpsed about twenty different islands before we landed, some half submerged in water, some completely under.
I assumed it was once the main island where the Perinthian King used to live because we were standing in the middle of a ruined castle.
The castle’s floor was consumed by ocean, but the top balconies were still unaffected after all these years.
We were alone again.
The thatchers were close. I could still hear the bone crunch of their wings, but Dahes’ dragon flew off the second we landed. The girl the other thatcher flew was also gone. I caught glimpses of her before she disappeared to another island. Her ankles and wrists had layers of dried blood beneath thick manacles. Whoever she was, she must have been Dahes’ prisoner for a long time. She looked more skeletal than the thatchers, her clothes rotted with too many holes in the fabric to be considered functional.
